Robarcher's blog

And so it came to pass that one day, having been considered ‘talent’ for most of my life, and having spent most of my energy on defending this ludicrous position, I eventually became known as ‘non talent’. Anti talent? Whatever, I did not make the talent pool in my next consultancy job, and it hurt.

I only found out there was a talent pool when some whipper snapper – who I had recruited – blurted out that he was on it. And what effect, dear reader, did this label have on my performance? Needless to say, I did not handle it well:

In my previous post I talked about the need to explore values and look for patterns across a number of different tests. That's because I am sceptical that there is a single list of values which covers every context. The best we can do is think from different perspectives about what's really important to us.

Over the years I have taken countless values exercises and tests. Below are some of the best and I've interspersed my results to demonstrate the variability involved - and the risks of doing just one!

So many leadership courses are based on the idea that to improve performance we must firstly sort our thinking out. So we focus on motivation, confidence, self-belief or ways of controlling or removing anxiety and stress. Sounds logical enough.